Meaning & readings
waves, billows, Poland
On’yomi ハ
Kun’yomi なみ
Nanori ひら、みな、みなみ、わ
Origin
The character 波 combines water on the left, shown by the three-stroke water radical 氵, with the component 皮 on the right. The 皮 component serves as a sound hint — it tells you roughly how to pronounce the character (similar to how 皮 is read), not what it means. Together, the water radical and sound hint create a character that represents waves or billows, the way water moves and ripples across a surface.
Components
- 氵
- 皮
A sound hint component points at the character’s pronunciation, not its meaning — don’t read a meaning into it.
Common words
Reference
- Strokes
- 8
- Kangxi radical
- 85
- Formation type
- Phono-semantic (meaning + sound hint)
- Grade
- Grade 3 (Kyōiku)
- Frequency rank
- #740 (newspapers)
- Former JLPT
- level 2
- Unicode
- U+06CE2